


Unforgiven

by Lizardbeth



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, dark au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-24
Updated: 2015-09-24
Packaged: 2018-04-23 05:32:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4864940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lizardbeth/pseuds/Lizardbeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kara promised to come back for him on Caprica, but it doesn't go so well this time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unforgiven

**Author's Note:**

> archival fic. Written originally June 2012 but I'm not backdating it because the ship tag has vanished from the autocomplete because of some kind of tagging fuckery so I'm going to put it back.  
> For a prompt of "Sam usually forgives Kara, but what would he not forgive?" Which led to this darker take on what might have been.

* * *

Kara and Helo with the rest of the S&R team prowled through the forest, wary for the Cylons and looking for the resistance, heading for the old high school. Months later she was sure they'd had to move somewhere else, but still she hoped Sam and his team would be easy to find.

They cleared the treeline and Kara used binoculars to look toward the base. "Oh gods," she whispered under her breath at the sight. It had been hit and burned. Her heart felt too small in her chest. Cylons had found the resistance. _Please, gods, let them have escaped, please don't let Sam be dead, please_. Yet she thought he was probably dead.

"What do you want to do?" Karl asked after his own look.

She tilted her chin in resolve. "We check it out. Maybe they left a sign where they went. Sharon, you stay here with the rest of the team to bail us out if it's not deserted." And because any lingering Resistance members might not recognize her as friendly, but that went without saying.

She and Karl approached warily, but there was no movement from the ruin. Up close the damage was worse - it had been strafed by Raider fire in an airstrike. There were scarcely two walls standing together. But as she and Karl got within the damage area, she saw the promising sign that there were no bodies, but some of the rubble had been moved and stacked, as if to get the bodies.

"Centurions could've done it," Karl told her, catching a look on her face. "They burn the bodies."

She knew that; she'd seen one of the pits where the Cylons threw the dead and burned them. She knew it was more likely that was what had happened here, too, that the toasters had found them and they'd died. This was a fool's mission and always had been. She should never have let him stay here. "Damn it."

"Let's look around a little more," Karl suggested. "Maybe they left a clue about where they went."

That seemed futile since any clue left behind would be one the Cylons could find, too, but Kara tagged after him, keeping an eye out for Cylons returning to this place. Not that they would, knowing it was burned to the ground.

An odd sound behind her made her twirl, rifle ready. But she saw nothing, only the vibrations of debris settling. But still, it tickled some sense, and she called quietly, "Karl, hold up." She approached the pile of loose bricks, beams, and a chunk of the roof.

It was ridiculous how much her chest swelled at the hope that maybe she'd found a survivor. "Hello?" she called. "Is anyone there?" Then she held very still and didn't breathe.

That sound repeated, a little more audibly. A gasping moan.

"Helo! Survivor!" Trusting Helo to watch her back, she knelt and started to dig through the rubble, pitching it heedlessly to the side. What she couldn't lift or shift on her own she got Helo to help.

She found boots first and black pants, practically gray with dirt, but those looked like Sam's boots and C-Bucs pants. "Sam?" she called. "Sam, can you hear me?"

Then from somewhere underneath a faint incredulous whisper, but in a familiar voice, "Kara?"

"We'll get you out in a moment, hang in there," she called urgently. To her surprise but relief, she heard a hoarse laugh, as if that was funny.

Helo got their medic to come up and Sharon to come help with one of the roof beams pinning down his arm. It was broken the wrong way and Sam's face looked too pale as they unearthed it, but he was conscious, staring at them and blinking at the sudden light. Thankfully nothing but his arm seemed badly hurt, and Helo helped him sit up and offered water, which he drank thirstily with a hand that shook, as the medic looked at his broken one.

Then his gaze found Kara's and just as she started to grin and lean forward to kiss him, overjoyed to see him alive, his eyes dimmed to a glare. "You came." But it wasn't said with appreciation or gladness, but a flat statement.

"I said I would." She reached for his face and he shied back, nearly hitting the medic with his head, so she couldn't touch him.

"You came too late."

"Sam--" she tried to protest half-heartedly, stricken with guilt.

"They're all dead," he said flatly. "All of them. Jean, Hillard, Kripke, all of them..."

That made something catch in her chest, as much as she wanted to shrug it off. It hurt, but mostly for the pain in Sam's eyes; it was far deeper than the fractured arm, grief and despair and a touch of madness for being trapped, slowly dying under the debris for days.

"We came as soon as we could," Helo told him.

Sam said to her, as if she'd been the one to speak, "Too late."

"How did you survive?" Helo asked.

Sam laughed once, bitterly. "Because I'm a cockroach; I checked into this hotel of the damned and I can't check out. A hundred billion dead and I won't frakking die."

The medic wrapped his arm and said, "That's best I can do without x-rays." Sam had barely flinched during the tending, and he looked no more eased when it was done.

"Did any of the Resistance make it out? So we can go rescue them, too?" Helo asked. His voice was calm and almost gentle, recognizing that Sam was on the ragged edge, barely conscious and sane.

"What part of "all of them" do you not understand?" Sam demanded, voice cracking for the first time. "All of them. They fell on us out of the sky like a frakking hammer of the gods. No time to escape, just die." His gaze went past them, eyes dark with memory. "Then the Centurions came and executed anyone still alive. I heard Hillard screaming... I waited for them to find me, but they didn't."

Kara touched her lips with her tongue and said softly, hurting for him, "I'm so sorry, Sam."

He flicked his eyes at her, cold and angry. "Like that makes it better?"

Mathias came closer, interrupting with the noise she made before speaking, "We should clear out of here, sirs. We're awfully exposed, and if you want to search for more people to rescue, we need to get back to the Raptors."

Kara cleared her throat. "Right. Everyone back to the birds."

Sam passed out ten meters from where he'd struggled to his feet, but that made it easier on Kara, not to have to look at his angry and accusing eyes that blamed her for not coming back in time. Her vague dream of a happy reunion drifted away like smoke on the breeze, and she wondered whether he'd ever forgive her for this.


End file.
